Category Archives: Make gentle the life of this world

Wise policy is setting priorities – differentiating between that which is merely important and that which is truly essential. And it would be both callous and self-indulgent for those of us who sit comfortably at home to form policy without full knowledge and consciousness of the costs to others, young men and women and children, whose lives turn on the abstractions of our discussion.

At the outbreak of the First World War the ex-chancellor of Germany Prince von Bulow said to his successor, “How did it all happen?” “Ah, if only we knew,” was the reply.

Make gentle the life of this world

In Africa, I tried to answer those who asked, “If the United States is fighting for self-determination in Vietnam, then how ca it not support the independence struggle of Angola and Mozambique?” I answered unsatisfactory, for there is no real answer. Yet to the questionnaires, it is less our intention than our pretension that Is objectionable. Thus does false principle destroy the credibility of our wisdom and purpose that is the true foundation of influence as world power.

Make gentle the life of the world

“But you and I know that this war will not have any real victors and that, once it is over, we shall have to go on living together forever on the same soil” – Albert Camus

Make gentle the life of the world

“There is no such thing as inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom.” – Bonar Law

Make gentle the life of the world

It is better to suffer certain injustices than to commit them even to win wars, and that such deeds do us more harm than a hundred underground forces on the enemy’s side. – Albert Camus

Make gentle the life of the world

Whatever the costs to us, let us think of the young men we have sent there: not just the killed, but those who have to kill; not just the maimed, but also those who must look upon the results of what they do.

We have treasured our educational system also as a firm pillar of the liberal community. This faith, however, is not unanimously shared. One critic has said: “Education (is) by its very nature an individual matter…not geared to mass production. It does not produce people who instinctively go the same way…(yet) our millions learn the same lessons and spend the same thing at exactly the same time. For one reason and another we are more and more ignoring differences, if not trying to obliterate them. We seem headed toward a standardization of the mind, what Goethe called ‘the deadly commonplace that fetters us all.’” This speaker was not part of a Berkeley rally; it was Edith Hamilton, one of our greatest classicists.

Each nation has different obstacles and different goals, shaped by the vagaries of history and of experience. Yet as I talk to young people around the world I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of their goals, their desires and their concerns and their hope for the future. There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve in the streets of India, a former Prime Minister is summarily executed in the Congo, intellectuals go to jail in Russia, and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the world. These are differing evils; but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows; they mark the limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings throughout the world. And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.

It is these qualities which make of youth today the only true international community.

Our answer is the world’s hope; it is to rely on youth. The cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present which is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger which comes with even the most peaceful progress.

We learn, at the last, to look at out brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognise that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this plant are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land.

Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a solution.

But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us as brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

We must turn the power and resources of our private enterprise system to the underdeveloped nation within our midst. This should be done by bringing into the ghettos themselves productive and profitable private industry – creating dignified jobs, not welfare handouts, for the men and youth who now languish in idleness.

Make gentle the life of this world

The jobs have fled to the suburbs, or have been replaced by machines, or have moved beyond the reach of those with limited education and skills …

The fact is, if we want to change these conditions – those of us here in this room, those of us who are in the establishment, whether it be business, or labour, or government – we must act. The fact is that we can act. And the fact is also that we are not acting.

Make gentle the life of this world

Our society – all our values, our views of each other, and our own self-esteem; the contribution we can make to ourselves, our families, and the community around us – all these things are built on the work we do. But too many of the inhabitants of these areas are without the purpose, the satisfaction, or the dignity that we find in our work.

Make gentle the life of this world

And there are others: on the back roads of Mississippi, where thousands of children slowly starve their lives away, their minds damaged beyond repair by the age of four or five; in the camps of the migrant workers, a half million nomads virtually unprotected by collective bargaining or social security, minimum wage or workmen’s compensation, exposed to the caprice of fate and the cruelty of their fellow man alike; and on Indian reservations where the unemployment rate is 80 percent, and where suicide is not a philosopher’s question but the leading cause of death among young people.

Make gentle the life of this world

And the effects of the shortage of meaningful employment are reinforced by a welfare structure which is frequently destructive both of individuals and of the community in which they live.

More basically, welfare itself had done much to divide our people, to alienate us one from the other. Partly this separation comes from the understandable resentment of the taxpayer, helplessly watching your welfare rolls and your property tax rise. But there is greater resentment among the poor, the recipient s of our charity. Some of it comes from the brutality of the welfare system itself: from the prying bureaucrat, an all powerful administrator deciding at his desk who is deserving

We must recognise the full human equality of all our people – before God, before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous, although it is; not because of the laws of God command it; although they do; not because people in other land wish it so. We must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do.

Freedom is not money, that I could enlarge mine by taking yours. Our liberty can grow only when the liberties of all our fellow men are secure; and he who would enslave others ends only by chaining himself, for chains have two ends, and he who holds the chain is as securely bound as he whom it holds. And as President Kennedy said at the Berlin Wall in 1963 ‘Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.

With some trepidation, I argued [during the Cuban missile crisis] that, whatever validity the military and political arguments were for an attack in preference to a blockade, America’s traditions and history would not permit such a course of action. Whatever military reasons he and other could marshal, they were nevertheless, in the last analysis, advocating a surprise attack by a large nation against a very small one. This I said, could not be undertaken by the U.S if we were to maintain out moral position at home and around the globe. Our struggle against communism throughout the world was for far more than physical survival – it had as its essence our heritage and our idealism, and these we must not destroy

America was a great force in the world, with immense prestige, long before we became a great military power. That power has come to us and we cannot renounce it, but neither can we afford to forget that the real constructive force in the world comes not from bombs but from imaginative idea, warm sympathies ad a generous spirit..

Over the years, an understanding of what America really stands for is going to count far more than missiles, aircraft carriers, and supersonic bombers